Its effects on parenting around sleep are powerful, and parents feel that pressure. When you dig into the research on sleep training, however, you find that it isn’t as soundly supported as many parents and professionals believe. In this post, I’m highlighting 10 facts about sleep training research that everyone should know to make informed decisions about how you support sleep for your children.
This article features an outline of realistic expectations for your child’s sleep in the first 5 years, updated for 2022. It can be hard to know what healthy sleep patterns even are at each age. This article will cover healthy and developmentally appropriate sleep expectations for infants and toddlers by age. Download this as a PDF for an easy reference.
Bedsharing is a wonderful, biologically normal way to care for your baby at night. It’s also a big controversy in safe sleep. Since many pediatricians only focus on a “just don’t” attitude towards bedsharing, parents are stuck trying to navigate safe sleep messages and the reality of nighttime parenting. In this guide, I’ll answer some of the many questions I hear from parents about sleeping with their baby, cosleeping safety, bedsharing, and many questions that I also asked as a new parent.
Its effects on parenting around sleep are powerful, and parents feel that pressure. When you dig into the research on sleep training, however, you find that it isn’t as soundly supported as many parents and professionals believe. In this post, I’m highlighting 10 facts about sleep training research that everyone should know to make informed decisions about how you support sleep for your children.
Read MoreDepending on your social circles, sleep training is a given, a tool reluctantly used to improve sleep, or something to strongly oppose. In all the controversy surrounding sleep training safety, efficacy, necessity, and whether or not it’s moral, we rarely stop to consider how the concept got started. Sleep training, however, is a relatively new entirely western idea. It is a concept that emerged from changing values, shifting cultural norms, and the beliefs of prominent physicians in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
We live in a sleep training culture. Over the last 200 years, our values and beliefs have shifted leaving few parents and professionals familiar with biologically normative feeding and sleep patterns. Even modern pediatricians have minimal training on developmentally normal sleep and lactation. Modern life makes these norms difficult to support, and the response by our systems has been to push change on babies rather than develop new ways of supporting families.
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In an ideal world, parents talk through major parenting decisions and values ahead of baby’s arrival. However, we don’t live in an ideal world. It’s hard to know all the things you should discuss, and even when you do, it’s hard to know how you’ll feel once baby is here. The reality of your emotions and experiences can be hard to predict.